The last few years have given us three good British films about four exceptionally brilliant mathematicians: The Theory of Everything (Hawking), The Imitation Game (Turing at Bletchley) and The Man Who Knew Infinity (G.H. Hardy and the Indian genius Ramanujan in Cambridge). They taught us something about these men (so that the semi-numerate could talk about maths) while issuing a challenge to the ignorant to find out what they actually discovered, which the films barely attempted to explain.

The films function as middlebrow bio-pics, but by engaging with mathematical matters they also put some viewers in mind of the novelist C.P. Snow and his seminal “Two Cultures” lecture of 1959. Snow lamented the “ocean” that he felt lay between the literati and scientists, and accused the former of being “natural Luddites”. He himself could bridge this sea because he had been a physicist. He approved of the way the Soviets were training huge numbers of physicists and engineers (they had “judged the situation sensibly”), and worried that Britain would be left behind because of the “traditional culture”. He explained that at a literary party, not a single guest could repeat the Second Law of Thermodynamics (“the response was cold. And also negative”: it’s clear that he wasn’t the life and soul). He succeeded in making it celebrated among scientific laws.

His call to action in education and literature struck an international chord; F.R. Leavis was so enraged by its success that he weighed in with an almost comically unhinged attack on Snow, published in the Spectator. Leavis thought that he had no obligation to know about science and that Snow’s pontificating showed that he was “as intellectually undistinguished as it is possible to be”, exposing “a complete ignorance”. In America Lionel Trilling more subtly analysed flaws in Snow’s argument — for example that it almost disregarded international politics.

The debate was surely the last major branching of an ancient cultural tree: Leavis’s attack was the old hostility that the Romantics had felt for the Utilitarians. Some of our best creative writers from Arnold to Orwell had produced impressive critiques of contemporary culture; and we had valued our sages and visionaries such as Carlyle, Ruskin, Shaw and Russell. But by the 1960s, we seemed, as a society, to be losing touch with such elevated thinking, and Leavis’s fury was probably self-defeating.

In the 50 years since, further scientific and cultural revolutions have happened. In the literary world, now much more diverse, some well-known writers have taken on scientists, including Michael Frayn in Copenhagen, his play about Bohr and Heisenberg; John Banville in his Revolutions trilogy; Harry Thompson in This Thing of Darkness, on the voyage of the Beagle; and the wonderful Penelope Fitzgerald in The Gate of Angels, about Cambridge physicists. Most, though, have been content to ignore Snow’s strictures. I know an excellent writer who said that he would despise a scientist who didn’t know some great literature; yet he could not quote a single scientific law or theorem, and admitted that he stood self-accused of hypocrisy.

"[Snow] explained that at a literary party, not a single guest could repeat the Second Law of Thermodynamics. . ."
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In New York City a journalist (I don't recall, but I imagine it was for the Times) attempted to test Snow's assertion about the Two Cultures by calling the English Department of Columbia University and asking a professor there to explain that scientific law. The answer rolled fluently off the professor's tongue. The professor on the other end of the telephone line happened to be Marjorie Hope Nicolson, who taught a course devoted to science and literature and who had written "Newton Demands the Muse: Newton's Opticks and the Eighteenth Century Poets" and "Science and Imagination," among other books.

Alice

March 29th, 201712:03 PM

It was interesting to hear Brian Cox on Front Row recently mentioning C P Snow and the two cultures (did he see this article?): he said he didn’t think that there was a problem, from his point of view, and surprisingly quoted Wordsworth’s famous lines on Newton’s statue, saying that there is a sense of beauty and romance about science. He also mentioned Richard Holmes’ ‘The Age of Wonder’, which he said showed that scientists at that time were as excited as poets about their discoveries. Then he said that his collaborators Robin Ince and Dara O’Briainn were good examples of culture bridges, eg the latter is a theoretical physicist in terms of his degree. However, though what they do is very valuable, there is a question as to the level at which they function as bridges, I would say.

Robert O'Brien

March 26th, 20179:03 PM

Eric Macdonald is right of course to say Leavis deserves better treatment than I gave in such limited space; right of course that much science deals with the inhuman and that the humanities are crucial; and right that we must listen to those who ‘creatively speak about’ the human world ‘in sensitive humane ways’.
There were two main reasons why Leavis’s attack rather backfired – first, and not surprisingly, the lecture was read as little more than a personal attack on Snow. Leavis is responsible for this. If the lecture was a classic it was a classic of unrestrained invective. There was little of the living creative expression which Leavis himself demanded from excellent writing, and the fact that the main target of the lecture was unquestionably Snow himself hugely distracted from his arguments. Leavis wanted above all to take Snow as a writer down.
Then the second, more fundamental fact is that Leavis himself had previously argued , in his analysis of the 17th cent, that the old organic culture had become fractured, and that Newtonian science had reduced linguistic creativity & split the nation’s culture into, on the one hand, the refined, learned & scientific; and, on the other, the more creative and living culture of England. So in his lecture he was evidently angry not just at Snow, but at a civilisation that was dominated by rational scientific thinking rather than creative life. In other words, as critics pointed out, he had inadvertently lent weight to Snow’s argument that there were indeed two cultures and that he, in the literary culture, was against the modern scientific civilisation (though not he claimed against science itself).
Regarding Eric M’s criticism of Snow: I don’t think he thought that knowing the laws of physics was more important than a good foundation in the humanities – there’s no evidence for that view, and we should not forget that Snow was a novelist not a scientist; but he thought that the literary culture ought to pay more respect to the scientific (something that Aldous Huxley does, for example, in Brave New World, without approving of it).
My own point is that more creative writers should understand more about science, not that they should come out in sympathy with it.

Anonymous

March 22nd, 20175:03 PM

I read this article with interest. I'm just about to take my GCSEs and they are overloaded with science. Physics, Chemistry, Biology and Maths are compulsory, yet History, which is surely essential for any understanding of the political and social world we live in, is an option. I agree that it is helpful to have a knowledge of the scientific developments which shape our lives but I feel strongly that they should be seen within the context of the arts and humanities.

Robert O'Brien

March 21st, 20176:03 PM

Some very interesting comments, especially from Chuck Lanigan, Don Phillipson, Erin Macdonald and Jan Sand: it would be good to write another article responding to them, but in any case I will try and post comments on them. To take Don Phillipson's for the moment, he is quite right, except perhaps on the point about international politics: I think Trilling meant that Snow wrote about the international scientific communities almost as though they were all part of one rather friendly community in which were rivals of the others, rather than locked in an appallingly dangerous contest of military and technological might, with all the existential implications that had. I think he was right, but Don P is also right that Snow was extremely concerned about the competitive side of the whole matter, so it is a question of what is considered most important - that competition, or the more individual human and artistic response to massive threat.

Bill Gruber

March 21st, 20175:03 PM

Love Chuck Lanigan's quote from Thoreau: the thing we have go to remember about a lot of science, especially cosmic physics, is that is basically suprahuman. It's not about us. Didn't someone say that the proper study of mankind is man? And that will always be the case whatever science does. I think that is what Leavis may have been getting at.

John Lobell

March 15th, 20174:03 PM

Let's be sure to read Snow. He points out that those in the literary culture are often ignorant of much of science and proud of it. A point even more valid today.

Jim McCaffery

March 14th, 20173:03 PM

What makes the argument between Literature and Science seem particularly outdated is the fact that in most social and educational circles both cultures have been largely replaced by Marketing and Technology, respectively.

Chuck Lanigan

March 14th, 20171:03 PM

Okay. This got me going. Why in h*ll don't we address these questions in school and society instead of rarified intellectual discussions? E.g., Neil Postman suggestion that we ask about any new technology: 'What problem (if any) does this solve? What problem(s) does it create? Couple of reading suggestions 1. Postman's 'Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology' and 'Building a Bridge to the 18th Century: How the Past Can Improve Our Future. 2. S. Zuboff's 'In the Age of the Smart Machine: the Future of Work and Power'. 3. David Noble’s ‘The Religion of Technology; The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention’. I’m also a huge fan of Tom Standage (wonderful writer and 'splainer) and James Burke's 'Connections' and 'The Day the Universe Changed'. Populizers? Sure. And antidotes to scientific reductionism and data-driven idiocy we are falling heir to. Go back and read Thoreau as well: ‘All our inventions are but improved means to unimproved ends.’

Eric MacDonald

March 13th, 201711:03 PM

I think you give too little credit to FR Leavis, and I do not think that Snow's success was the reason for his outraged Richmond Lecture, which is – I think Leavis was right in this – a classic text and should be read more carefully. It was indeed outraged, for Snow was in a position of influence, and pretending to have a foot in each of the two cultures was in a position to do great damage, which I think he in fact succeeded in doing. Leavis, on the other hand, was a Jeremiah, scathingly reviewing a stuffed shirt, who had no claim to be really a novelist, and with his claim to having been a physicist, and thinking the Second Law of Thermodyanmics more important than a reasonable foundation in a humane culture, the result of which has been a gap that is now more than an ocean, but a number of light years in distance.
The idea that science really provides adequately for beauty in the sense in which Snow himself put it that "the scientific edifice of the physical world," he argued, is "in its intellectual depth, complexity and articulation, the most beautiful and wonderful collective work of the mind of man." Upon which Leavis comments: "it is pleasant to think of Snow contemplating, daily perhaps, the intellectual depth, complexity and articulation in all their beauty. But there is a prior human achievement of collaborative creation, a more basis work of the mind of man (and more than the mind), one without which the triumphant erection of the scientific edifice would not have been possible: that is, the human world, including language. It is one we cannot rest on as something done in the past. It lives in the living creative response to change in the present." And it is in this, which is collaborative, because the poem, as Leavis points out, is "out there" and only becomes real in its appropriation by the minds which read and understand it in the light of their experience. This is a foundation very different from the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which, while informative about the structure of the physical world, is not informative about the human world in which we must learn to live.
When Leavis' lecture was published, I thought it one of the most wonderful statements of the problem with thinking of two cultures that there has ever been. While science is indeed essential to much of our understanding of the world, it will not obviously help us to become more attuned to the human world, and may, as Leavis warned us, in fact interfere with our ability to respond to the human world, and those who creatively speak about it, in sensitive and humane ways.
If we do need to revisit the two cultures, it is pricipally to consider a bit more deeply what Leavis had to say, because his classic has been sadly neglected these many years.
Leavis' words are for the ages, and are perhaps especially needed now. Snows "Two Cultures" is distinctly of the past, and showed very little understand of what constitutes culture. Scientists appreciate this, and are very often well versed in the classical literary, musical and artistic works of their culture.